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Comment by badcppdev | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you. I think the only solution is for politicians to stop being soft on crime by funding police, prosecutors, courts, prisons, and rehabilitation services (rehab for both criminals and addicts). In addition the various tax authorities need to be empowered and funded to investigate tax fraud of all kinds and if caught then people need to be sent to prison rather than allowed to buy their way out of a sentence.

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Most of that stuff isn't even related to this. Corporations and rich people don't avoid taxes by lying to banks, they avoid taxes by hiring tax lawyers or lobbying the government. The best way to put the drug cartels out of business is to let Pfizer and Merck beat them on quality and undercut them on price and then use the tax money to fund rehab and education programs.

The actual crimes this is supposed to prevent aren't all that common, and to the extent that they aren't prosecuted it's largely because the perpetrators have political power -- or are themselves nation states -- not because we don't have enough prosecutors to do it. Especially if we would actually put the drug cartels out of business in the aforementioned way.

We certainly don't need more people in prisons -- largest prison population in the world, how's it working?

I suspect that this is more about detecting stuff like scammers and laundering, not people buying drugs. Unless we start drone striking Indian call centers or start doing full blockades on Russia the only solution is to work on international relations so that these crimes can be adequately investigated.

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